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Springbank 10yo (46%, OB, Circa 2003)

So I guess you managed to survive Christmas, congratulations! Christmas is over, but the year is not. There are still a few days left before this year is over, so I dug up two Springbank Whiskies from some twelve years ago. It’s not long ago since I reviewed a more recent 10yo from 2010, so its nice to see how this older version “behaves”. Yes, I said two Springbanks, so the last review on these pages for this year 2015 will be its brother (or sister), the 15yo, from the same time as this 10yo.

Color: Gold

Nose: Oily and fatty. Typical Springbank. Warm barley. Creamy sweetness. Vegetal. Lots of vanilla, vanilla sugar, vanilla pudding. Nice soft wood. Warm sugar-water. Amazing how sweet this actually smells. Dusty and powdery, but again think creamy and vanilla. Sure it shows its typical Campbeltown profile, but believe me, this is nowhere near the complexity of the current 10yo. Almonds and slightly acidic crushed beetle (with a hint of banana and paper), combined with more and more dusty and dry oak. Tiny hint of smoke and maybe some freshly cut muddy peat, but in fact it is hardly peaty at all. Seems a bit simpler compared to more recent offerings of the same age.

Taste: Sweet it is. Oily, nutty and slightly industrial. Lots of clay. Sweet toffee. Chewy. Very big aroma. Typical Campbeltown. Sugared fruits and again quite a lot of wax (and clay). Warming with noticeable peat this time. After a while a citrussy and fresh note appears. Lemon curd, not sharp lemon by itself. Lemon captured in sugar. After the big and sweet body, I didn’t see the rather weak finish coming. The nose still oozes aroma of wax, clay and wood, then you sip it, and it is big and sweet, and then it starts to leave the building rather quickly. The aftertaste is slightly off with oaky acidity.

It different from the 2010 10yo, but both are great. If you can get this one for not too much money, I would say pick it up. It’s good and very educational compared to more recent bottlings. Where every other distillery try to manage some kind of consistency, Springbank is not that anal about it. The Campbeltown profile is pretty specific, so I don’t think its customers are seeking consistency, but rather welcome the evolution over the years as well as the batch variation that is clearly the with all of Springbank’s products. One of the Whisky nerds favorite distillery, and you are probably one of them, and just like me, proud of it.